


Call Me Back Again

by nice_girls_play



Category: Across the Universe (2007)
Genre: Bisexual Male Character, Canon Queer Character, Canon Queer Character of Color, F/M, Happy Ending, Injury Recovery, M/M, Past Relationship(s), Pining, Platonic Cuddling, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, References to the Beatles, References to the Beatles solo work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-16
Updated: 2016-10-26
Packaged: 2018-05-07 04:02:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5442626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nice_girls_play/pseuds/nice_girls_play
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Max returns to New York after Vietnam. The music's not the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. My heart is breaking for you, little lamb

Max is back -- the jungle spits him out quickly and Walter Reed manages to spit him out even faster. His head is still spinning by the time he makes it home to New York.

Max is back and Jude is gone.

Max is back and Jude is gone and he wants to be angry at Lucy for that. He wants to be angry and he wants to ask where Jojo and Prudence went and how Sadie's doing and he wants to ask how the hell things disintegrated so fast after he left. But the weight of the world is in his baby sister’s eyes and he can't bring himself to bother her. 

So he's silent most of the time, containing the outbursts he once let fly as easily as breathing, because he doesn't know what will fall out if he does and it's pretty clear everyone else is hurting enough -- as badly as he is -- and not half as good at hiding it as they think they are.

\--

He’s back in New York and at Sadie’s place within a month of being out of the hospital, two weeks rent in hand (via a friendly reminder to the taxi company that re-hiring American veterans returning from active duty is good for business). He vaults up the stairs and knocks less gently than he means to – it’s before two o’ clock, but, whatever, he waited forever for Lucy to go to work so that he could make the leap. 

Sadie stares at him like an eighth wonder for two minutes before picking him up and squeezing him like a favorite toy. He wonders what his father would say about him surviving the jungles of Vietnam, the petri dish of infection in a Saigon hospital, the madness of Walter Reed only to be suffocated to death on the front step of a six-foot-tall blues singer, literally swept off his feet. 

“Why didn’t you stay at Princeton, son?”

\--

Prudence comes back and this time she uses the front door. She brings a bag, a bunch of outfits from the circus, and a pair of arms big enough to hold the whole world. And even with all of these empty spaces that need filling, she bunks with Max for the first month that she's back, sleeping in the same bed that once held all three of them -- him by the wall, her on the edge with Jude in between; the warm English filling in their awkward-but-cheerful freak sandwich.

The first night she's there, he tries to stay awake as long as he can, telling her stories about basic training and the first base his platoon was sent to cool their heels before the Army decided it was time to drop kick them into the jungle, but ends up slipping under around 3am and staggering up from a nightmare less than two hours later. They're back to front with Max as the little spoon and her arms are around him, tight and heavy in a way that reminds him of the pack he wore as he pounded ground through the jungle. Her dark hair brushes against his face and he closes his eyes against the floodgate of tears that has suddenly been thrown wide.

The next night, Pru is the one who wakes up suddenly, tense and whimpering and clutching Max like he's a teddy bear -- which he goes with until her fingernails start to dig into his sides.

Afterwards, they institute a new ritual: two bedtimes. “Two bedtimes” means two changes of pajamas, two sets of goodnight hugs, and, if either of them is up for it, two bedtime stories. It's as good a solution as any Max has ever thought up in a lifetime of playing pied piper for two younger sisters. They have beer before first bedtime -- whether it’s at home or at a club -- and tea before second bedtime. Sadie still has a tin of the loose leaf Irish Breakfast Jude scoured the international market to find and he brews it double strong, drizzling honey at the bottom of the cup before he pours, topping it off with a splash of milk. They drink it at the kitchen table; Max wrapped in Sadie's robe and Pru in one of his old BVD tees, faded to a dull dirt brown.

"You and I have got a ways to go," he tells Pru.

She smiles wryly, scribbling her reply inside a crumpled candy bar wrapper and passing it to him across the table.

_The years ahead will show, how little we really know._

\--

Jojo arrives six days after Prudence and three days after the institution of “two bedtimes.”

Pru has a record playing and Max is on the couch, rolling a joint, talking about the tunnel rats Sergeant Raccoon told him about.

“Was that really his name?” Pru's voice is skeptical, softened with a hint of sing-song giggle.

“Yeah, that was his name!” Max hopes it still is his name. He’s had enough of talking about other people in the past tense. “Well, maybe not, but how am I supposed to remember? It was something unpronounceable and we all just called him Rocky. Anyway, Walter Reed turned my brain to Swiss cheese. Don’t believe what they tell you, Pru, the military's idea of helpful drugs is for shit.”

The front door opens inward and they're both instantly alert, eyes scanning for intruders, enemy combatants, old friends, new friends, a tearful Lucy, a happy Jude... Max breathes a sigh of relief when it turns out to be none of those.

Jojo's face is as stony and cool as ever when he walks in.

Sadie, exiting the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dish towel, is less so.

"You never changed the locks?" he asks after a long moment of mutual staring.

"You never dropped off your key," she answers, voice wavering. 

They beat a strategic retreat to their room after that -- the record still playing on the turntable, Max’s lighter forgotten on the tray. 

\--

Talking about Rocky is almost certainly a mistake. Three hours later, Max rockets out of bed, the sensation of poisonous spiders and millipedes crawling all over him and unrelenting darkness broken only by the damp of rain and the red glare of ammunitions fire. Pru is already awake, sitting against the wall with a book balanced on her lap. 

“They’re still talking,” she says.

He nods and lets his head fall back against the pillow.

They end up spending Second Bedtime in their room, drinking warm Dr. Pepper instead of tea. The voices in the living room rise and fall through the walls.

"I've never seen Sadie cry before."

The crash from tonight’s nightmare is particularly crushing and Max finds he can't vocalize an answer.

Pru seems to understand. She slides down next to him on the mattress and fills the space by telling him about her first love (and first broken heart). Anna, a girl in her cheer squad who had doled out affection without any ulterior motives but also no awareness. Pru never told her. It had seemed like a heavy load to lay on anyone at the time and, in Ohio, she'd never been sure of the people around her or the space she was in. 

She'd confided in someone else once and ended up with two broken teeth for her trouble. The revelation that the misplaced confidante was her older brother and that he’d subsequently told her to "quit being a dyke" afterward makes Max want to wrap her up in a tight hug and never let go. It makes him want to walk a thousand miles to whatever dark spot in a homogenized suburban hellhole the shitty eldest son of her shittier family landed in to ring the bell and return the favor when he answers; tell him that Pru has a new brother now and this one was trained to kill by the United States Army.

Instead, he leans his head on her shoulder. When her arm comes up to lie across his back, he finally manages to get his vocal chords working.

"I will flirt with just about anyone that sits still long enough."

She giggles.

"Gee, I never noticed that, Max."

"But I think, overall, when it comes to the matters _l’amour_..," he says, purposely flattening his already terrible French pronunciation. "The stuff that actually sticks around for more than a night... it's been a bit lop-sided."

That revelation doesn't feel as heavy as he thought it would and he thinks he must have done it wrong, so he keep talking.

"I mean, just looking at ratios here. I've only really loved a couple of people and in the mix... I mean, there's you guys and one or two guys at Princeton and Lucy -- who doesn't really count in this case -- and Jude and Brigitte Bardot, because I mean, come on, who wouldn't?"

Pru's eyes glitter in the lamp light, a little more damp than usual at this time of night. She smiles to him and pops the cap off the second bottle of Dr Pepper, taking a long swig before handing to him.

"Not Bardot."

"No?"

"Not for me."

"Are you _dead_?"

This makes her giggle even harder.

"She's got this weird look in her eyes -- like, if I met her on the street, she'd expect me to pick up her dog shit."

"Good point."

"You learn to watch for these things when you're like us."

Through the walls, Jojo and Sadie have gone quiet. Max is beginning to slip under, the bottle of DP still in his hand and Pru propping him up but also beginning to sag against the wall. The strains of the guitar and then Jojo's voice begin to stream through.

_"I know and I'm sorry, yes I am, but I never could read your mind..."_


	2. But now I know, I only hurt myself

Jojo's back to stay and the world realigns to a state that could almost be called normal. Almost.

Sadie and Jojo spend a week making up in a room that's just a little too close to Max and Pru's for comfort. Voyeurism has never quite been Max's bag -- and, to make matters worse, he's kind of off the whole sex scene these days. He'd love to blame the morphine but it's been almost two months since Walter Reed and this might be a “mind-over-matter” thing, which probably makes him an even bigger head case than anyone ever suspected.

They end up alternately taking refuge between the living room and the kitchen. He crawls into the closet once with a box of sugary cereal and a bottle of Iron City, pilfered from the case Jojo brought back from Pittsburgh. He's in there for ten minutes before Pru opens the door and jettisons him in a less than delicate manner.

"Closets are for clothes," she says, in a tone of voice that says it is the most important piece of advice he will ever receive. Way more important than anything Princeton or the Army tried to teach him.

"Sorry,” he laughs. “I didn't see the memo. Do we get memos?"

“On pink paper and everything," she says, smiling.

It's the first joke he's made in a while. Pru knows better than to draw attention to it.

Lucy, on the other hand, can't seem to help but highlight every minute detail that normal people would deem as progress and, somehow, it makes him want to lean back into the waves even further.

Lucy was around for some of the nightmares when he was in the hospital and the haunted look that lingers in blue eyes when she looks at him is enough to ensure that she's not around for the next one. 

She's still at her apartment near Columbia –- that helps. And she works nights at the diner -- which, thanks to the police raids on the bars in the Village, is seeing a spate of new "after hours" business. That also helps. It's normal for her to drop in after a shift when he and Pru are in the middle of their tea before Second Bedtime. Sometimes she sits and partakes in a cup with them. Max never tells her why he and Pru are up so late and after the first few times, she stops asking.

"Are you angry with her?" Pru asks after one such late night/early morning. He's the little spoon again, watching the sunrise reflect off the brick facade of the building opposite them in pink and orange strobes while her fingers pat and stroke his hair.

"No." He doesn't need to ask what for. A month in bed with Pru and as close as they are, the space between them still feels empty.

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah." He's thought about it at length and none of it -- not the stuff around Jude's deportation anyway -- could actually be called her fault. He knows she’s hurting, too – standing in the open with everything laying in pieces around her: him, Daniel, Jude, _him_... 

And yet…

"It might be easier if I was."

"Living is easy with eyes closed," she sings, sliding her hand around to cover his eyes. A giggle escapes his lips. He brings a hand up to cover hers.

"Maybe."

"Go back to sleep, Max."

Five weeks after Pru's return, Rita follows her to New York. Sadie's space, once empty and paining, is filling up with people as well as sound and recording equipment. The two girls end up retreating to Pru's old room - the one she'd relocated to after initially bunking with Max and Jude. More closet space -- a note which makes him and Pru share an ironic smile -- and a queen mattress that doesn't come with a shell-shocked drop-out under two layers of blankets.

Pru hugs him extra tight that day and tells him that Two Bedtimes is still on.

For her sake, he hopes she's wrong.

\--

Max had taken his promise of Ivy League hospitality seriously enough, but arrangements hadn't exactly been set in stone that first night. 

Sleeping wherever you happened to collapse was reasonable most nights in the nursery, but everyone needed fresh sheets and a place to stash their toothbrush. Tragically, the fraternity sergeants-at-arms kept a tight rein on purse strings and they would only believe Max broke so many bed frames a semester. Theft was only a viable option when there was enough space to conceal what you’d stolen, but he let his mind run through several scenarios anyway in the early morning hours of the next day.

By the second night, he was sober enough to remember the bed Wes the Janitor had arranged for Jude down in the bowels of the maintenance building and the idea was halfway to being written off entirely.

…until Jude told him that Wes the Janitor was actually his _dad_ and the tidy little cot with the stripped mattress was essentially his way of providing both apology AND accommodation.

_"Sorry I knocked up your mother and very sorry you came all this way to find me but I can't bring you home to my real kids. Have fun with the noisy pipes and cockroaches."_

Screw that. Decision made. Jude would be bunking with him. He told him so. He’s pretty sure he told everyone.

“My roomie! Right here,” he slurred to Nancy, the barmaid, Jude’s laughing face in the crook of his arm. 

The fresh sheets were easy enough to come by – a lot easier to steal than a full mattress and bed frame -- and the large single he had wasn't such a chore if you turned sideways and cuddled up, eliminating the dangers of stray knees and elbows. They were old pros at it by the time they arrived at Sadie's months later. The queen-sized mattress she offered had been luxurious in comparison (and with two pillows instead of one).

He always curled in anyway -- Jude's warmth (though minuscule compared to the heat that radiated from Max like an atomic core) was a comfort, particularly as the bitter cold of their first New York winter settled in. His stinky hair and pits weren't really a burden either -- though he'd pissed and moaned and chased his lanky bed mate into the shower enough times back then. 

Pissing and moaning even louder when Jude came back wet from the shower and sprawled on top of him like a giant, limey star fish. Pissing and moaning that turned to childish giggling really quickly, then wrestling, then to something that was decidedly _not wrestling_...

Pru came to New York and then the Village looking for people like her. Max knows it now and now that Pru knows about Max, she's determined to shepherd him through his Grand Awakening and the high like a petite, pretty version of Doctor Robert.

It's not quite working the way she probably thought -- largely because there's really no awakening to speak of. Max knows who he is and, even among the like-minded, gender-compatible nightlife the bars offer, there’s no one that’s a heavenly match or even a comfortable fit. Apart from whatever herbal relief his would-be suitor is offering or whatever watery beer the bar has on tap, both of which he partakes from excessively. 

As out of it as he feels, he doesn’t miss the black and white coasting up to the front door.

“’Don’t want to spoil the party, Pru, but I think the pigs are about to turn this place back into a pumpkin.” The three of them manage to link arms and spill into the alley behind the bar on a torrent of glitter and spilled beer just as the blue meanies force their way in. 

Max kisses her quickly before departing. The ladies are cozy, arm-in-arm, safely steering towards home, and he needs to wander just a bit longer. In his dreams, he wanders further and further, walking on dark water that looks uncannily like the ocean he crossed to fight in Vietnam. 

\--

New York postcards are made of paper in more ways than one – selling paper images of paper people in a paper city that looks a little like the place Max has come to call home but isn’t really at all. 

He hates them. But he spends what seems like the entire night chasing across the water to find the perfect one and by the time he wanders into one of the dinky tourist traps next to the grind house in Times Square, he’s too buzzed to give a shit or even be picky. 

If he’d been sober (or warm, or dry), he would have grabbed one of the rude ones with topless women on one side or a scene from _Rosemary’s Baby_. But he’s wet with rain and still half out of it, and the Empire State Building works just as well as any other image he wants to drive his point home with.

With this much booze in him, he can either be funny or poetic. He tries for poetic.

_Oh, honey pie_  
_You are driving me frantic,_  
_Sail across the Atlantic_  
_to be where you belong._


	3. But there's no one left at home

Sadie and Jojo are in full creative flow as they work on the tracks for the first album. The sound equipment and session musicians keep piling up and the music keeps pulsing through the apartment, creating a pulsing, beating heart where once there was only empty space. Frankenstein’s monster of soul music. 

Max loves it. He loves coming home to it at the end of his shift each day and he loves how the music covers his screams in the night. Two Bedtimes isn’t such an odd ritual in a house where someone is awake at all hours in a city that has rather a monopoly on the whole concept of never closing. 

The worst thing he has to worry about when he comes home is that the five other people awake and working on the third take of their second track for the night might have already finished off his beer. That happens once and his reaction is extreme enough that Jojo starts bringing a case home each week just for him (American lager first, then darker, maltier ales from across the pond). Sally, their new drummer and newly escaped from the life of a teetotal, religious cult leader's daughter, leaves a note taped to one of the bottles:

_Don’t need a gun to blow your mind._

He blows the bald girl a kiss when he finds it.

Even when there's no music playing, Sadie hums and sings everywhere: the shower, the kitchen as she fries eggs and homemade sausage with paprika and fennel seeds, even Max's room when she tiptoes in to pick up the dirty clothes from the floor to stash in the pale blue pillowcase she takes to the laundromat every Tuesday.

"Does that tune have a name?" he murmurs, face half in his pillow. The blue-gray lighting of the room letting him know it's sometime after Second Bedtime, but at least an hour before he has to be up for his shift. His head is still muzzy from the chamomile tea he drank, yet he's reasonably sure it's Friday. 

"I'm not sure yet," Sadie says, not bothering to whisper now that it's clear Max is awake. "Right now, I'm just kind of free-forming from 'don't say it.'"

"Don't say what?" he asks, not clued in. He turns toward the middle of the mattress to face her. There’s a cold spot next to him where Prudence used to be. He’s not used to it yet.

"'Don't say it,'" she replies, voice lilting, drawing out each syllable melodiously.

"Don't say it...'" he echoes, less melodiously.

"'You can say anything, but don't say 'goodniiiiiight' tonight.'"

"I like it. Too bad it's morning."

"Not for you it isn't, sleepyhead,” she says, dropping a crumpled peasant blouse onto his face. "Dream away. We're closed for business until nine."

He dutifully turns over, eyes drawn to the buffed shadows of graphite and charcoal and sharp lines still engraved in the wall.

Liverpool is six hours ahead of New York. Which means, if Max was the kind of person in the kind of city that kept normal hours, Jude would be awake when he was asleep and asleep when Max was awake. They probably lived most of their lives that way without even knowing it: Max under the covers reading with a flashlight when Jude was just being tipped out of bed by his mother, dreams overlapping, dreamscapes running one into the other.

Max likes that idea: a shared internal country that starts at his skin and stops at Jude’s, mapped out in vine charcoal and motor oil, spilled paint, salt from sweat, saliva, free of the stink of napalm, alcohol swabs, and gun powder. In his quieter moments, he feels himself reaching out -- across dark water, through smoke and steam -- always abruptly pulled back to reality, by the ticking of his cab’s meter or the arrival of a drink on a bar top. 

\--

Max has been in New York for four months, back working at the cab company for nearly as long, when he picks up a night shift. His last fare of the night takes him to the Village. His foot nearly slips off the brake when a familiar blond head ducks into the back seat.

"Where to?" he asks, superfluously. He already knows where his little sister wants to go. 

Lucy doesn’t give up once she’s committed to something and, right now, she’s committed to talking. She’s going to pick and hammer and wait in silence like a pale shadow until they talk about this. Max is scared that, one night, she’ll pick too closely and he’ll explode. 

Four months since his return to Sadie’s and the place is suddenly as empty as the day he came back. Sadie and the band are negotiating a contract for a tour next year and Pru and Rita are hanging out in the Village, the one night the police don’t raid the queer bars and, subsequently, the after-hours diners don’t need their night staff to work over time. He and Lucy sit in silence for a while, the television flickering a black and white movie in a corner of the room. He bypasses the Newcastle and goes straight for the tea – he may be a bad influence, but she’s still his baby sister. They’re on their second cup and -- nearly -- their first joint when she gives up stalling.

“I wish you would talk to me,” she says.

“What do you want to talk about, Luce?”

“I want you to tell me how you feel. Not about the war, not about being back...," she can't seem to manage the words 'about me' and the irony of that is particularly brutal at three in the morning over unsweetened tea (they’re out of honey) and not enough weed (not yet). 

_Tell me you’re mad at me, Max._

_Tell me you hate me._

_Yell at me._

_Look at me._

His fingers are shaking as he attempts to roll the ends of the paper, spit already drying in the open air.

“Did you even love him?” he finally asks, the words spilling out before he can catch them. “Did you give any thought to what might happen if he followed you?”

Containment broken, and yet he's calm. Exploding might have been easier for both of them, if the crumpled look on her face is anything to go by.

She hadn’t thought about it. Max knew that. That reckless streak ran right through both of them: don’t think, follow what you feel, and no one can damn you for anything that you do. 

And… wow, look at that. He _is_ angry. He’s so far beyond angry, he hasn’t noticed it for months. 

Because it’s not fair. He got shipped off to a burning jungle and Lucy set fire to her own bed in solidarity. She shouldn’t have bothered. It hadn’t brought him back any sooner and it’d just made him miserable once he was home. She was lucky. She’d had something good – held it in her hands in a way he’d never quite managed -- and she pissed it away on a clutch of angry whims and now she wants him to say something that will make _her_ feel better. 

“I’m going to bed," he drops the shredded, lost cause of joint in the tray and shuts off the TV on his way out.

He’ll get over it, Max tells himself. He loves her and he’s stuck with her and he’ll get over it. Eventually. He doesn’t quite slam the door behind him. 

He leaves a note on the door for the others:

_Called in dead to work. Don’t wake me._

\--

Max has always been a sound sleeper. In his life, he has famously slept through his father’s shouting, his mother’s shaking, his sister’s dance recital, his own high school graduation, the first time Prudence left, the first time Lucy slept with Jude. 

People can call him a lazy bastard if they want to, but he sees no valid reason why he needed to be awake for any of those events. The school didn’t need him to show up to know he’d passed, Prudence didn’t need him to hold the door open to give her permission to leave, Julia did not need him to help her lace her tiny ballet shoes and Lucy didn’t need him to hold his best friend’s dick. 

He sleeps through being airlifted out of what’s left of the jungle, the ambulance ride to the base in Saigon, the transatlantic flight. He wakes up in Walter Reed with a bump on the head and a hole in his side where, by all accounts from people much smarter than him, his spleen should be.

Max has been home for months and the hole is still there -- migrated higher and slightly to the left.

And, somehow, through the ether, he knows Jude can't be doing much better. This pain he feels across their shared landscape is too enormous to just be his -- the echo of imaginary explosions and real blood that haunt his dreams both real and waking. There’s too much of it. Too many variables, too many visions and sensations of things he didn’t experience and too elaborate for even his vivid imagination to spew out.

He wakes up gasping, sheets damp and rucked down past his waist, hand clawing the cold spot next to him. 

And… fuck it. It's Jude. He knows that Jude is hurting -- if sixteen months of being apart and the distance of an ocean haven’t killed that instinct, nothing will. He knows that boy like his own skin and he can feel every ripple of despair like the beads of sweat clinging to his brow after a nightmare and every scrape of Pru’s nails in his hair. Pru, Sadie, Jojo, Lucy all of them so fucking worried and not needing to be. The answer has been there the whole time.

The lady that runs the pervert tourist trap (“Desmond,” according to her name tag) is not happy to see him a second time. This time, he buys a fifth of Jack and the card with Laurel and Hardey crouched and dangling from an unfinished skyscraper on one side. He sticks the card in his pocket and writes his message on a sticky bar top after half the bottle is gone.

He’s not a poet and he doesn’t try to be this time. 

_Come home, Liverpool. The world didn't blow up and I can’t sleep._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Small editor's change -- I swapped out what had been a postcard of Harold Lloyd in "Safety Last" for Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in "Liberty." Because the Beatles put the latter on the cover of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Laurel (British) and Hardy (American) are separated by pop artist Richard Lindner on the cover, but reunited on the postcard.


	4. Don't let another day go by, my love

Jude comes home.

Jude comes home nine months to the day after Max got back.

His chest is too tight, lungs too small for the air they need to pull in. He screams out what little he has left and clutches at Jude to keep from collapsing on the ground.

Jude, who looks exactly the same – hair just a bit longer and eyes a bit darker; who barrels toward him and lifts him up to hold like he weighs nothing; who all but carries him to his own car like a five-year-old that needs help being strapped into their seat. He's still warm and his hair smells like salt from the sea air, sweat, and coppery rust from the cot he just spent ten days bunking on to get here. 

Max can’t believe it.

Two weeks after Wes the Not-So-Deadbeat Dad called him with an arrival time and a pier number, he still can’t believe it.

The homecoming is warm and loud and rather crowded even before Lucy gets there. The crowd from outside and the crowd from the roof coagulate upstairs eventually, separated from the sunny open air by the chiding of a couple of boys in blue. There's a flash of gold hair somewhere and Jude is... not gone (thank god). In the room but apart from him, a wandering specter from the corner of his eye, bombarded with pets and bear hugs and kisses from well-wishers and newcomers, all the members of their expansive, extended family, so happy to have him home. 

Max distracts himself with the members of the crowd who are here exclusively to celebrate and jam, smoke some hash, talk studio time with Sadie and Jojo and drink the three kegs the RAT editing staff procured for the occasion. 

Pru wanders close and stays tucked into his elbow on the couch for what seems like hours. He can’t quite figure out if she’s an anchor or a barricade or a friendly ‘do not disturb’ sign. Either way, the crowd gives their little wandering island nation wide berth, particularly once Rita joins them to flank Pru’s other side. They pass joints and plastic cups of amber lager between them, smiling and laughing as the alcohol and camaraderie blunts the sharper edges. Max feels covered, far more than he did on a dying hill overseas or in a hospital ward in Maryland. 

At the end of the night, Pru and Rita drift from his side toward their room, Pangea split by earth quakes and shifting foundations. Bereft, he staggers to his own room on the opposite end of the apartment. There’s a flash of gold -- then gold and black -- in his periphery and he leaves them there, blocked out by wood and plaster. 

He’s asleep and back in the jungle almost before his head hits the pillow. 

Specifically, he’s in a city inside the jungle. The ground under his boots littered with broken bricks and crumbling foundations, bent rebar and stray pieces of razor wire. The heat from the fire is on his face and the stench of burning chlorophyll and what smells like sausage frying in Sadie's kitchen -- but he knows, to the bottom of his gut, isn't -- is choking his lungs. Max gasps like he's been running for hours, then feels his breathing slow, an answering coolness like fingers on his face -- across his forehead and then down his cheek and neck. His brain takes him from the fire of Vietnam to the coolness of ocean waves and what might be the top deck of a submarine. Yellow and bobbing to the surface while Max flails and scrambles. He wakes up just as the periscope blinks at him, every bit as shocked as he is. 

There’s a dark-haired Brit sitting on the edge of his bed. 

Jude is looking at him and Max feels his stomach trade places with his heart, the latter promptly leap-frogging over it and back up into his throat. Jude's eyes are huge and dark and his mouth is tight, softening to a Mona Lisa smile that he wants to lick the corners of, followed by the scruff on his friend’s jaw, the smooth line of his neck…

And, wow, he is _not_ as over the whole sex thing as he thought he was. His timing, as ever, is impeccable.

“Well,” he rasps, clears his throat, moves to lean up on his elbows, aiming for nonchalance. “This is familiar.”

“I was told there might be tea?”

It's a little early for it – this is only First Bedtime for Jude, after all. Max doesn't tell him that – because who the hell can fault an Englishman for wanting his tea before two in the morning? Instead, he climbs over his best friend’s knees and stumbles toward the kitchen. He practically kicks Sally away from the stove so he can reach for the kettle and top shelf where the last of the tea leaves are. 

He makes him a cup of tea. Watches, rapt, joint in hand with a glass ashtray balanced shakily on his lap, as Jude’s mouth glances around the rim, then puckers in alarm.

"It's a bit much, huh?" he asks, trying to remember how much honey he poured in. The jar was nearly empty and what was left at the bottom had started to crystallize. He'd panicked and let the gelatinous mass spotted with hard fragments drip a little too long into the mug, finally scraping what was left from the bottom of the jar with a bread knife, hoping that the heat from the water would take care of it all. 

Jude laughs, shivers again, takes another sip of tea -- prepared this time.

"All too much?" Max asks.

"Who taught how you to make tea?" There’s a glimmer in Jude's eye when he looks up at him.

"You did, I think. I may have adjusted the ritual it in the months since I've been gone -- and you've been gone. Kind of."

"I can tell.” He takes another sip – fingers bent into determined lines around the base of the cup, jaw set as though trying to disguise the gulp.

“Sorry it’s not proper tea.”

“It’s proper _enough_ tea,” Jude says, oddly defensive for someone who just had their taste buds assailed.

“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter. You were back in the mother country for almost a year -- I know you're going to miss proper tea.” 

God knows, it had been murder on him the first time. Max thinks of that first taste of "septic bilge water" slurped from and promptly spat into a paper cup in the student union at Princeton. He'd laughed so hard at the look on Jude's face, somewhere between a grimace and Wile E. Coyote falling from mid-air.

“Yeah, well. I'll live,” he coughs on his next swallow, wiping his mouth. “I think. I missed everything here a lot more."

“What, they don't have noisy radiators in England?”

Jude shakes his head.

“Or watery lager? Or drafty apartments with the same amount and frequency of foot traffic as a national monument? ”

“Or crazy buggers in their bed,” Jude supplies, stealing a pull from Max’s joint before passing it back to him. “No. ‘Haven’t got any of that there and I missed all of it. Mostly you.”

Max's chest is abruptly too small for his lungs. He holds his breath for a moment, waiting for it to loosen up. Focuses on small details -- like the fact that Jude's lost his coat since the start of the party, leaving bare arms underneath short t-shirt sleeves; long dark hair feathered over his stretched collar. Finally talks when he realizes his breathing might be getting even shallower...

“Did you? I couldn’t tell,” he says, which sounds ridiculous considering how tightly Jude had held on to him for the first few minutes he'd stepped back onto American soil. "But then I’m kind of a loser like that.”

“You’re not a loser,” Jude smiles.

Max shrugs, taking another drag from his cigarette.

" _I’m_ a loser. I saw my old girlfriend back home, the day we came into port. She was waiting for me at the dock, married to a bloke I used to work with and out to here with their baby," he gestured with his hand in front of his belly, making Max smirk. "Just wanted to be the first one there to tell me what a complete fucking tosser I was.”

Max laughs, coughing and choking on acrid smoke. “I like her already.” 

“You would,” Jude smiles, with a flash of something that might be melancholy in those dark peepers. “She told me that if I'd wanted to tell her how I felt – that I’d met someone else and wasn’t coming back -- I should have made it plain, not just stopped writing.”

Max tapped a line of ash into the ashtray. That was a habit of Jude's -- doing and not explaining. He'd left the merchant navy without explaining. He'd left his girlfriend back home without explaining. He was 90 percent sure Jude had left Wes the Janitor's basement cot-plus without explaining. 

Jude did and let his actions speak for themselves. So close to Max's own way of following what he felt without thinking. He'd been a fan… right up until he'd stumbled into his own room one morning to find him half-dressed and wrapped around his sister. 

“Smart girl.” 

“Yeah, far too smart for me.”

"Definitely smarter than I was -- being born into a country with a bunch of guys with sexy accents and no draft board," he reaches over to scrub his fingers through Jude's hair, soaking in the answering giggle -- puffs of honey sweet, still slightly beery breath against his face -- like it's the last bit of oxygen that his lungs will ever take in. 

They sit like that for a bit – Max smoking, Jude slurping down his too-sweet tea, thoughts flowing, drifting. He saw his best friend’s face on that rooftop… and the internal map of shared space between them that he’d felt come together on that pier seems to tear down the middle. Or rather, it unfolded into a larger shape than he initially thought – the space between two fixed points just a little bit wider than he expected. 

It’s easy to ignore when they sit together like this, mere inches apart as opposed to the gulf of time and space he’d experienced in the living room. 

“Prudence says you’re…out?”

He breathes in slowly to keep from choking this time. Stabs out the remains of his joint and shuffles the ashtray to the floor -- to give his hands something to do while he formulates his answer.

The slang is new. Almost as new as Max, who only just heard it used a few weeks ago, in the back corner of a secret bookshop in Greenwich. Pru had been scanning the shelves for an Allen Ginsberg title while Max alternated between staring at the Mae West poster on the wall and watching the light fixtures above them flicker, throwing pulsing shadows across the ceiling. Jude's been back in the country for seven hours and seems to have not only learned the terminology but grasped the meaning and parlance of its usage in their time. 

_‘Out of the closets and into the streets, man…This is our moment.’_

It’s extraordinary. But, then again, it’s Jude, so of course it would be.

“I’d hazard to say I was never really _in_ , if you know what I mean.” His voice doesn’t shake and he wonders how much of that is the previous imbibing and how much of it is because, like with Pru, it doesn’t feel like a weight to carry. Certainly not with Jude. “It’s not a surprise, is it?”

“Everything about you surprises me. It was the first thing I liked about you.”

The first thing... His heart beat abruptly doubles in his chest, pushing against long-healed incisions. He laughs dryly, more breath than tone. 

“Was the second thing how I could roll a joint in the dark?”

“That is an admirable skill.” Jude smirks, amused.

“But that wasn’t it?”

“I think it was your heat next. You're like a blast furnace.”

“Pru and Rita told me the same thing!” Max laughs. 

There had been a rare moment at Christmas – when the three of them were the only ones that failed to return to their family homes for the holidays and the radiator petered out the day the wind chill dropped below zero. Both Rita and Pru curled around him that night as the temperature outside plummeted, all three of them buried under the blankets they hadn’t used to cover the windows. Covering them just as they would cover him months later.

"I missed it a lot. Even the summers are cold in Liverpool."

"What else did you miss about me?"

"No," Jude shakes his head, mouth pursed on a final swallow and moving his cup to the table next to the bed. "It's your turn now. What’d you miss about me?"

_Missed_ , not liked. Max waits for Jude to realize his slip-up, feels his heart stall in his chest when he doesn’t. He stares at the walls instead, noticing new shapes where there were once just stains from skin oils and grey smudges from metallic particles.

"Did you redecorate the place while I was asleep?"

"A bit before, actually. Sadie and Jojo brought up some of my things up from storage during the party. Art supplies, some drawings, a few clothes."

Max stares at each of them, taking in color and value, memorizing them, just in case they disappear from his life overnight again: crowded sketches, a set of four abstract white boards, each with four red washes dripping down.

"I like that one." He nods his chin towards the abstract series, eyes still tracing the flow of red on white.

"Thanks," he says, the melancholy bleeding into his voice now, "I was thinking of you when I did those, actually."

"Won't all of these just be a bitch to re-pack?" He asks, wondering how many nails Sadie had managed to hammer in without him noticing and how many she would have to pry out once Jude left again.

"Who's re-packing?" Jude asks, interrupting his musings. "I've only been home for twelve hours."

"Have you?"

Jude's eyes really are quite huge. Bambi-like. And, it seems, designed to pluck at every string Max has left between his neck and his toes. 

"Did you forget what you wrote to me already?"

"No!” he interjects, then waffles as he tries to remember. “Some of it. Maybe." 

In his defense, he'd been thoroughly plastered when he'd written to Jude. Plastered, shredded, flung through the wrong end of a kaleidoscope, and clutching at every fragment of stable ground he could find a foothold on. It had been easy to get lost in the haze.

Jude reaches over, past him to the wall, plucking at the postcard pinned just above Max's head. Turns the card over (Stan Laurel, looking down and holding on with a loose grip on the girder and a tight grip on his partner’s necktie, looking perturbed by his predicament) to show Max his own messy handwriting:

He remembers writing the second part ( _Come home, Liverpool. The world didn't blow up and I can't sleep._ ). 

He does not recall writing the bit just above it (but that is his hand-writing, so he must have):

_How can I love you  
When you're so far away?_

So. He’d tried for poetic after all.

It hits him then, finally, that the map may be smaller than he imagined in that moment on the roof. And, for all the flashes of gold in his bleary vision, that Jude may not have come home for Lucy. At all. 

"Max?"

"The accent,” he looks up, meeting Jude’s questioning eyes. There are a few things he should have made plain, too. Months ago. Years ago. He won’t make that mistake again. “First thing I liked about you. First thing I missed. Obvious, right?"

"You're far from obvious," Jude smiles, taking the card from his hands and moving it off to the side. “If you want to stop...”

“I wouldn’t want to miss it,” Max shakes his head and, it may be the weed, but he thinks a hint of a melody bleeds into his speech as he says it. He leans in to Jude’s space, smiling at the beery, honey sweet breath hitting his face now. 

“How are you…?”

“I told you. Everything below the neck is just fine! Now, if you'd care to test that out--”

Jude's hands are on his face, his lips slanting wetly over Max’s, cutting him off before he can finish his sentence.

\--

Max wakes up from another nightmare at six, sweating and panting almost as hard as he was a few hours before. 

Jude, still suffering from the nautical equivalent of jet lag, is already awake and, in addition to a pot of proper tea from the tin of Irish Breakfast he rescued from his pack (“Noticed you lot were empty”), makes three rounds of toast while Max washes his face and brushes his teeth. 

They find Jude’s marmite, Rita’s plum jam, and what looks like a stick of rancid butter squirreled away in various parts of the fridge, secreted behind loose bottles and Sadie's casserole dishes. They eat at the table, balanced on the same, teetering chair, threatening to break underneath their combined weight while Jude draws and Max plays with his ridiculously long hair. 

Pru and Rita join them at seven – Rita flees the room initially, returning with an embroidered quilt and a sharp reminder.

“Shared area, you guys!” she shouts, tossing the quilt at the two of them. “Put some bloody clothes on next time!”

Pru just gives Max a knowing smile and reaches for the teapot.

“Did I miss another memo?” Max grins at her, tucking the Technicolor fabric around his lap.

“Not your fault. We ran out of pink paper,” Pru winks.

“Hey,” he murmurs over his shoulder into Jude’s ear. “I’m getting better at this.”

Jude laughs as Max grabs for one of his charcoal pencils, scrawling a smoky caption at the bottom of his sketch (a flock of birds, black and grey, swooping and diving over the edge of the page) large enough for both him and Pru to read from across the table and upside-down: 

_Getting better all the time…_


End file.
